Families Warm Up to Gatherings : Research Shows Relatives Feel Closer Now Than 50 Years Ago
Anticipating the holidays? Or does the idea of melding various elders, spouses, stepchildren and half-siblings give you palpitations?
Looking forward to sizing up aunts, uncles and chums? Or do you wonder if you still have much in common?
What about the eggnog party, the famous family turkey stuffing, the special gifts? Are all the old-fashioned customs worth the cost, time, effort and physical and emotional drain?
You bet.
According to experts on aging, in spite of changing life styles and the hassles of a mobile, fast-track society, Americans are embracing family rituals and reunions more than ever before.
“There’s been a lot of exaggeration about family problems during the holiday season, but data shows that the vast majority of parents and children really enjoy getting together. They feel much closer to family now than they did 50 years ago,” says gerontologist Dr. Lillian Troll, adjunct professor at the University of California in San Francisco, and one of 10 authors of a new study, “Reunions and Rituals,” recently published by American Behavioral Scientist magazine.
According to Troll, family rituals and reunions help us get in touch with our past selves and re-evaluate past events in the light of the present. She also suggests that the repeated practices of earlier times of life, or of earlier generations, give family members feelings of continuation into the future, reaffirming important bonds. Moreover, when younger and older generations swap new ideas and history, it helps everyone recognize and negotiate the inevitable changes that take place in a family.
But it is not uncommon for the most loving family members--especially elderly parents and distant children--to approach reunions with some ambivalence. They come together wanting intimacy and closeness, but fear old ghosts of dependency or haunting silences if emotionally laden issues are stirred up.
The “bah-humbug” set who proclaim they dread holidays usually do so because they wish for more than they really expect: more unconditional love, more personalized gifts, more affectionate reminiscences. Also, those individuals who are already disturbed often are more distressed during holiday times. “Those who are unhappy in the present remember only misery in the past; those who are happy in the present remember a golden past,” Troll believes.
But even without the excuse of a holiday--or a funeral--family reunions seem to be spreading as a common and pleasurable phenomenon. Dr. Mildred Seltzer, of Scripps Gerontology Center at Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio, thinks that this move toward strengthening kinship is natural in an impersonal world.
Seltzer points out that it is “sheer idiocy” in our contemporary society to fantasize about the flawless holiday celebrations of some mythical family that has “a mother who stays home, a father who goes to work, and two kids who are well-scrubbed and don’t use dope.”
As more than half of all women go to work before making the plum pudding and one-parent families increase in number, large groups of single individuals are learning to live together in family like situations, creating new traditions that hold them together.
Today’s “reconstituted” or “reorganized” families do maintain deep personal nostalgia for yesteryear. Take retired CIA official Frank J. Sheridan III, 71, who calls himself the “patriarch” of a Maryland family that includes two ex-wives, three adult children with three half-brothers, two daughters-in-law, one son-in-law and a grandchild. He thinks he has been successful in keeping his family from drifting apart by integrating various customs from in-laws over the years.
For example, the highest honor and symbol of sentimentality is to receive a gift wrapped in the funny papers. “Silly, but nice,” Sheridan says. “I like knowing comic-strip wrappings will be passed down through the generations.”
Coincidentally, it was the resurgence of interest in reunions in comic strips such as “Cathy” that ignited psychologist Seltzer’s interest in get-togethers. Her findings are that “reunion events, such as community or high school ‘homecomings,’ alumni weekends on college campuses and family gatherings are important in American society.”
Frank Sheridan put it this way: “In our family, reuniting is not really a matter of genealogy and pride, though that’s important. The objective is to cherish brief times as a unit, enjoy each other and, if necessary, face the world together.”
